Buffer’s Library: How to Work With it and Around its Bugs

Buffer is part of the workflow at my agency. The Library feature, which is still in Beta, acts as a repository of your evergreen content where you can quickly reschedule articles for promotion with a few clicks. This feature is currently available to “Teams and Agencies” accounts. Like any product still in Beta, there are going to be bugs. The advantages the Library affords us Social Media marketers outweighs the quirks. In this article, I’m going to show you how to use the Library and a workaround for a bug that unintentionally converts Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ link post into picture posts. The Twitter Library does not have this issue.

The Library: How to Keep your Evergreen Content Organized

The majority of the time you are going to inherit an existing social account which means Buffer will grab some of the previously posts articles as well as some of the analytics about each post. Using the analytics data, you can easily decide which articles are worth adding to your Library.

1. Click on the analytics Tab

2. Hover over the “Most Popular” tab and select which metric you wish to use for the sorting your posts. In this example I selected “Most Clicks”

3. Once you find a post worth re-promoting click on “Save to Library”

4. From the top navigation bar click on: Content > Library Beta to see your post.

TIP: notice how the link does not display a preview image. Another minor bug is that the preview image is absent from link posts in the Library.

5. Click on “Add a tag” so you can assign a meaningful tag to the post. This will help you sort your content for re-promotion later. It’s easy to skip this step but you’ll thank yourself for doing it when you have 100+ articles in your Library covering multiple subjects.

6. Click on “Create a new tag”. If this is your first time Tagging a post, you’ll see a window like this pop up. Otherwise you’ll see a list of all the tags you’ve already created.

7. Enter the name of your tag and click on “Create”

8. After you create the tag click on it to assign the tag to the post. Notice the little check mark to verify which tag you are assigning. At this point you’re done. Just click the “X” to close the window.

9. This is what your Library entry looks like after you successfully added a link post.

TIP: If you are posting new evergreen content, enter the post into the Library first then schedule it for posting. This way you know for sure your content is in the Library and organized.

Buffer’s Link Stripping Library Bug

Remember folks, the Library is in Beta so there are going to be a few bugs creeping around. I discovered that when you edit a link post in your Library and save the changes, the link will get stripped out of the post and it’s converted to a simple picture post.

How to Recreate the Bug: What NOT to Do

If we were to post this Library item, this is what it would look like on Facebook:

As you can see, it’s perfectly normal. Now see what happens when we publish a Library item that was edited.

1. Click the “EDIT” link

2. Edit the post as desired and click “Save”

3. It doesn’t matter whether you make changes to the post or not. When you click “Save” the link will be stripped off the post. Even though the link preview appears it’s not really there. Notice how the icon when from a link to a photo? That’s the signal your link has been removed.

4. When you click “EDIT” again on that post, you’ll see that the link is gone:

5. When this edited post is published it only contains the preview image and not the link.

Workaround for Buffer Library Bug

If you want to modify a post in the Library, don’t. You have to recreate it from scratch. That is relatively easy as you can simply open another Buffer tab in your browser and copy/paste the text, links, etc… into a new Library post.

Buffer’s team has been alerted to this and is working on it. Again, they warned us it’s Beta so no hard feelings. The Library feature is a useful addition to an already solid product. Don’t let this bug stop you from taking advantage of this powerful tool.

Glenn has over 15 years of IT management and Internet Marketing experience. He has developed solutions for Motorola, Coke-a-Cola, and several technology start-ups.In the past 6 years, his SEO expertise has resulted in numerous top 10 Google and Bing listings in multiple industries including automotive, education, and entertainment.